Who Am I?

This is something that I have been wanting to discuss for quite some time now, something that really fascinates me, while at the same time turns my mind into knots. The question very simply stated is "What makes you, you?" The answer, however, is not as easy to come by, but is contrived from multiple meanderings of the mind and numerous opinions of supposed fact. To go into each and every facet of said opinions would take more time than I care to allow here, but I will put into focus a few of the more popular ideas that I have either come to adopt, or conjured up on my own and let you decide for yourself.

What makes you, you? What defines "self". The big debate that I have in my mind comes down to two different schools of thought, one being that you are in a sense your memories, and the other being that there is a soul, something inside that is driving you towards an end. Proponents of the memory theory believe that you are who you are because of events that happen to you over your lifetime. You take all your memories and catalog them in your brain and they become stories that your mind tells your body over time. The more often those memories are recalled, the more they tend to stand out and shape your conscious thoughts and actions on a daily basis, thus becoming you.

The other argument states that there is something deeper, something unknown that resides inside of you, a driving force that determines who you are. Some would call it a soul, some might say that it borders on predestination, you are born with it and have no free will. You may make choices in life, but those choices have already been determined ahead of time pushing you in the direction your life is supposed to take.


I personally can find fault in both theories and have actually gone ala carte and adopted pieces of each for my own theory. The major flaw I see in the "you are your memories" theory is amnesia, or losing of one's memory. If your self is supposed to be a story of what has happened to you in the past, plucking happy memories when you are happy and sad memories when you are sad, what happens when you no longer have those stories? Are you a blank, emotionless slate? I'd hate to think that if I lost all my memories I wouldn't be able to be happy because I lost the memory of my 10th birthday.

The other problem I have with the memory side is this: memories are created when something happens to the person, an event that is logged and stored in the mind to be recalled and recounted at a later date. So let's talk about food. I love pizza. How do I know I love pizza? Because I have eaten it many times before and my memory tells me that the past times I have liked it, thus creating the link that pizza is pleasing to me. But what of the first time? This is what hangs me up the most about the memory theory. What about the first time? There has got to be something inside, call it a soul, call it a disposition, whatever you like, but there has to be something that has the initial response you give when you encounter something new in order to create the memory for future use. Take pizza again. There must have been something inside of me that said, "You know this is pretty good," the first time I had pizza. Other people might have the same response, some might not like it all, while the rest might have to give it a couple more tries.

My contention is that that initial response is particular to an individual, a disposition to either like or dislike certain events in life. Furthermore, that disposition lives in a place that cannot be taken away by the loss of one's memory. I feel that should I lose all my memories today, I would still wake up and like pizza the first time I try it. That would then create a new, satisfactory memory that would be used upon my next encounter with pizza.


On the flip side, I do have my qualms with the ones that say that you are born a certain person, with a self already intact, and it resides in your soul. This to me sounds pretty absolute and throws free will completely out the window. I like to think that I have some choices in this world, and that I can learn from my mistakes, change my course in mid-stream and start anew sometimes. I'm not too keen on the fact that just by being born someone like Adolf Hitler changed the course of humanity as we know it. I don't think he was born to murder millions of people in this world. I think we have something inside of us that gets us to a point, then to another point, and yet another, but the decision of what to do at that point is ours. Once our decisions are made, we are now on that timeline and a memory of that event is created and used in the next event and the one after that. It is a combination of the two that makes us whole.

To put the two theories together is what I have tried to do, and I will try to explain it in the very simplest way I know how. I am who I am because of many, many simple events pieced together into a complex, abstract whole. I was born with an infinite amount of dispositions and half that number of possible events in life. When each event takes place, the disposition kicks in, a feeling is felt, a memory is created, and a link iss made to that event for future encounters. Now what I am proposing may seem very black and white, with no room for gray. That is not entirely true. I realize that you may in time learn to like things that you initially didn't care to have. However, that is precisely my point. You have learned to like them through your memories. Each time you encountered the event a new link was created, possibly a more favorable one to that situation until finally the sensation was pleasurable. But those links can be broken. If you lost those links, completely, a total loss of memory, I think you would not like that certain event upon reintroducing initial contact.

What I am offering seems to be the best of both worlds. You have a soul intact that is free to choose what to do and what not to do. The disposition and the subsequent memory that takes place then determines if it would be favorable for you to do such an event again. Once you have gathered enough pieces of information, then a self starts forming and never stops. At any time you can change direction, put yourself into new situations and surround yourself with different people and each new event will add a little more to who you are. And for me, to believe in this is to believe that deep down there is good in people, a good soul who may have been steered to the wrong events in life. And that gives me hope.